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Soldier’s Defense Questions Lone Gunman Claim

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. — A defense lawyer for Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales pressed witnesses on Saturday about whether more than one soldier might have been involved in the killings of 16 Afghan civilians earlier this year.

A 15-year-old boy named Rafiullah, speaking through an interpreter, described being shot in the legs on the morning of March 11 in Kandahar Province. Under questioning by a prosecutor, Rafiullah said he saw only one gunman that night, who shot him, his sister and his grandmother one after another with a pistol.

Did he remember telling an interviewer from the defense team just last month that he had seen “many soldiers”? Sergeant Bales’s lead defense lawyer, John Henry Browne, asked.

“There might have been some soldiers,” the boy answered. “We were scared.”

The government, in a case that has unfolded here in a pretrial evidentiary hearing that began on Monday, claims that Sergeant Bales acted alone when he walked away from his remote outpost in southern Afghanistan and shot and stabbed members of several families in a nighttime ambush. At least nine of the people he is accused of killing were children, and others were women. After the victims were shot, some of the bodies were dragged into a pile and burned.

Prosecutors said the killings, the deadliest war crime attributed to an American soldier in decades, might have been in response to a fellow soldier’s losing a leg to a bomb several days earlier, or because of the alcohol that witnesses have said Sergeant Bales drank earlier that evening or the steroids that an investigator testified were found in his bloodstream.

Video

Hearing Highlights Issues in Afghanistan

Douglas Schorzman, assistant foreign editor, discusses the trial of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales and the changed relationship between American and Afghan forces.

By Mac William Bishop, Channon Hodge and Pedro Rosado on Publish Date November 12, 2012.
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But defense lawyers have suggested in their questioning of witnesses in the hearings — intended to establish whether there is enough evidence to bring him before a court-martial — that the government’s account is too tidy. They have reminded witnesses of words like “raid” that were used in the earlier accounts of the attack, and asked others about reports of hearing helicopters.

Sergeant Bales, 39, a noncommissioned officer who has served 11 years in the Army, with three tours in Iraq before his deployment last year to Afghanistan, has not entered a plea, and could face the death penalty if the hearing leads to a court-martial prosecuted as a capital case.

To accommodate witnesses in Afghanistan, as well as the 12 ½-hour time difference, the court scheduled night sessions at Lewis-McChord on Friday and Saturday, with testimony through cameras and uplinks in Afghanistan and here.

No witnesses thus far have specifically been able to point to Sergeant Bales as the gunman. They mostly saw an American with a gun firing in darkness, leaving an opening for the defense, and an obligation by the prosecution, to challenge or bolster at every opportunity the notion of a lone, rogue soldier.

Sometimes the results were complicated, for example the testimony of Rafiullah, the 15-year-old gunshot victim.

“How many Americans did you see?” Maj. John Riesenberg, one of the prosecutors, asked during the Saturday night session.

“I just saw one,” the boy answered. But then he quickly added, “There might have been more — I just saw one.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 12, 2012, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Soldier’s Defense Questions Lone Gunman Claim. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe